until each white-fingered branch, each dew-glazed bud,
is lit from within.
2
Oregon state is mighty fine
if you’re hooked on to the power line.
—WOODY GUTHRIE
What Woody Guthrie leaves out of his song
about the Grand Coulee Dam
is not the flumed bulk
shouldering clouds and mountains aside.
Neither is it the beauty of the black river;
the smell of horses in rain in the wild gorge country;
the catalogue of states gripped by dust and Depression—
Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee;
nor even the old desire to tame the wilderness,
to shape river and mountain and desert to man’s will.
What’s never mentioned, left unsung,
is the nature of that time
when a dam was something to sing about—
an attitude of profound wonder, honed by despair,
humming through high-tension wires
all across the country,
technology’s promise
brought to every town and ranch and farm—not only
along the sinuous Columbia choked with logs,
but everywhere, all over this land, from California
to the New York island. An era
finding voice in a song about e-leca-tri-cy-tee.
A vast, implicit history, east and west,
growth and opportunity and inequality,
crystalline in the moment—
just as a hologram, when shattered, retains
the image of the whole in every shard and fragment—
from Maine to Oregon,
from Plymouth Rock to the Grand Coulee Dam
where the water runs down.
3
What Ansel Adams leaves out
is neither song, stone, nor innuendo
of light cascading through rain-laced aspens.
Lost at the base of Blanca Peak
are two figures: one pulls up stakes
while the other stirs a pot of coffee with a tin spoon.
They hike all day along the ridgeline
and at evening make camp in a valley
where a thin stream is marked by alder
and gooseberries. They build a fire
to cook macaroni and cheese, and heat cans of beans
in the coals for dinner. Late at night,
in contrast to all rules of composition,
they beat a riven, smoldering log with pine boughs
sending sparks like clouds and flocks of birds
and winter storm in the valley
rising up to the stars, splinters of light or stone,
innumerable and inseparable.
Books
Books live in the mind like honey inside a beehive,
that ambrosial archive, each volume sealed in craft-made paper,
nutritive cells, stamen-fragrant, snug as apothecary jars.
Like fossilized trilobites, or skulls in a torchlit catacomb
beneath an ancient city, Byzantium or Ecbatana,
or Paris at the end of April when vendors set their folding tables
filled with lily-of-the-valley beside every Métro entrance,
and the women, coming home from work or market,
scented already with the fugitive perfume of muguets,
carry handheld bouquets like pale tapers
through the radiant, rain-washed streets at sunset.
And then it is night, half the world ruled by dreams
from which arise narrative forms—riddles, fables, myths—
as mist lifts from mountain valleys in autumn,
as steam belches from fumaroles in benthic trenches
to whose sulfuric cones strange life-forms cling,
chrome-green crabs and eyeless shrimp, soft-legged starfish
sung to sleep by that curious cousin of the hippopotamus,
the whale, who, having first evolved from ocean to land
in the ever-eventful Cretaceous, thought better of it,
returning, after millions of years, to scholarly contemplation
in the mesomorphic, metaphysical library of the sea.
Late Spring
The kingdom of perception is pure emptiness.
—PO CHÜ-I
1.
I have faltered in my given duty.
It is a small sacrilege, a minor heresy.
The nature of the duty is close attention
to the ivy and its tracery on riled brick,
the buckled sidewalk, the optimistic fern,
downed lilacs brown as coffee grounds,
little twirled seedwings falling by the thousands
from the maples in May wind,
and the leaves themselves
daily greener in ripening sunlight.
To whom is their offering rendered,
and from whom derived,
these fallen things
urging their bodies upon the pavement?
There is a true name for them,
a proper term, but what is it?
2.
Casting about, lachrymose, the branches
of the trees at 4 A.M.
flush with upthrust flowers,
like white candles in blackened sconces.
All day I was admonished
to admire the beauty of this single peony
but only now, in late starlight,
do I crush its petals to my face.
Elemental silk dimmed to ash,
reddening already to the brushstroke of dawn,
its fragrance is a tendril
connecting my mind to the rain,
a root, a tap, a tether.
Such is the form of the duty,
but which is its officer,
the world or the senses?
The many languages of birds now,
refusing to reconcile,
and clouds streaming out of the darkness
like ants to the day’s bound blossom.
Spicer
Then sadness came upon them. Memories of love
or sorrow, favorite cats, barnyard animals,
dirt where called for
and all the appropriate longings, lusts, self-pity,
even rage at some tyrannical lapse of manners
over Chinese food—just so each chosen beam or ray,
each this, each that, so special and unique:
Grandma’s ribbon of Kansas whalebone,
hedge clippers from the root cellar
of the dazed horticulturist. Time passes. The years
groove one by one round the garlanded Maypole,
and the presence of natural totems
bears a significant impact on the order of our lives,
dew-struck daylilies dieseling skyward,
the beauty of the crab apple tree against a derelict wall,
each fruit a form of grace or an admission
of human frailty. You’re the MSG in my shark’s fin soup,
but I yam what I yam, sweet potato.
The rage of our days rises like lobster claws
doused in fake butter
from a seafood restaurant chain,
but in the end, dancing, we unfasten
our rainbow suspenders and lie down with death,
mongrel death, gym coach death
tossing dodgeballs of extirpation, turning somersaults
of grief on misery’s wrestling mats. Everything passes,
rain dissolving a lost box of cough drops, so many
Dutch Apple Pop-Tarts in the heart’s toaster oven.
Things are like that. We’re like that,
alone together, ignorant of shadows as cardamom
or star anise reveling in sunlight,
wild seeds blind to the spicer’s approach.
Invitations
To rhetoric: quarry me
for the stones of such tombs as may rise
in your honor.
To molecules: let me be carbon.
To the burners of bones: let me be charcoal.
To the drosophila: declaim to me
of finger bananas.
To eyes: that they might look askance
in the darkness and find me.
Emily and Walt
I suppose we did not want for love.
They were considerate parents, if a bit aloof,
or more than a bit. He was a colossus
of enthusiasms, none of them us,
while she kissed our heads and mended socks
with a wistful, faraway look.
She might have been a little, well, daft.
And he—Allons, my little ones, he’d laugh,
then leave without us.
And those “friends” of his!
Anyway, he’s gone off to “discover
himself” in San Francisco, or wherever,
while she’s retired to the condo in Boca.
We worry, but she says she likes it in Florida;
she seems, almost, happy. I suppose they were
less caregivers than enablers,
they taught by example, reading for hours
in the drafty house and now the house is ours,
with its drawers full of junk and odd
lines of verse and stairs that ascend to god
knows where, belfries and gymnasia,
the chapel, the workshop, aviaries, atria—
we could never hope to fill it all.
Our voices are too small
for its silences, too thin to spawn an echo.
Sometimes, even now, when the night wind blows
into the chimney flue
I start from my bed, calling out—“Hello,
Mom and Dad, is that you?”
Florida
There is no hope of victory in this garden.
Bent to the lawn, I acknowledge defeat
in every blade of St. Augustine
grass destroyed by intractable chinch bugs.
Hours on end I pull the woody roots
of dollar weed from the soil. At night I dream
of vegetable genocide, so deep, so abiding,
has my hatred for that kingdom grown.
Near dawn I hear the scuttle of fruit rats
returning to their nest within our wall;
they walk the tightrope of the phone wires at dusk,
leap like acrobats into limbs of heavy citrus.
Something larger inhabits the crawl space,
raccoon or opossum, purple carapace
of the land crab emerging from its burrow.
On a branch, green caterpillars thick as a finger,
from which will rise some terrible night moth.
The snails leave calcified notice of their trespass;
in the rain they climb the hibiscus and wait.
I labor in sunlight, praying for stalemate.
California Love Song
To ride the Ferris wheel on a winter night in Santa Monica,
playing nostalgic songs on a Marine harmonica,
thinking about the past, thinking about everything
Los Angeles has ever meant to me, is that too much to ask?
To kiss on the calliope and uproot world tyranny
and strum a rhythm guitar Ron Wood would envy,
to long for the lost, to love what lasts, to sing
idolatrous praises to the stars, is that too much to ask?
Arm in arm to gallivant, to lark, to crow, to bask
in a wigwam of circus-colored atomic smog,
to quaff a plastic cup of nepenthean eggnog
over one more round of boardwalk Skee-Ball,
to trade my ocean for a waterfall,
to live with you or not at all, is that too much to ask?
Angels and the Bars of Manhattan
for Bruce Craven
What I miss most about the city are the angels
and the bars of Manhattan: faithful Cannon’s and the Night Cafe;
the Corner Bistro and the infamous White Horse;
McKenna’s maniacal hockey fans; the waitresses at Live Bait;
lounges and taverns, taps and pubs;
joints, dives, spots, clubs; all the Blarney
Stones and Roses full of Irish boozers eating brisket
stacked on kaiser rolls with frothing mugs of Ballantine.
How many nights we marked the stations of that cross,
axial or transverse, uptown or down to the East Village
where there’s two in every block we’d stop to check,
hoisting McSorley’s, shooting tequila and eight-ball
with hipsters and bikers and crazy Ukrainians,
all the black-clad chicks lined up like vodka bottles on Avenue B,
because we liked to drink and talk and argue,
and then at four or five when the whiskey soured
we’d walk the streets for breakfast at some diner,
Daisy’s, the Olympia, La Perla del Sur,
deciphering the avenues’ hazy lexicon over coffee and eggs,
snow beginning to fall, steam on the windows blurring the film
until the trussed-up sidewalk Christmas trees
resembled something out of Mandelstam,
Russian soldiers bundled in their greatcoats,
of revolutionary zeal. Haughty as dictators, we railed
against the formal elite, certain as Moses or Roger Williams
of our errand into the wilderness. Truly,
there was something almost noble
in the depth of our self-satisfaction, young poets in New York,
how cool. Possessors of absolute knowledge,
we willingly shared it in unmetered verse,
scavenging inspiration from Whitman and history and Hüsker Dü,
from the very bums and benches of Broadway,
precisely the way that the homeless
who lived in the Parks Department garage at 79th Street
jacked into the fixtures to run their appliances
off the city’s live current. Volt pirates,
electrical vampires. But what I can’t fully fathom
is the nature of the muse that drew us to begin with,
bound us over to those tenements of rage
as surely as the fractured words scrawled across the stoops
and shuttered windows. Whatever compelled us
to suspend the body of our dreams from poetry’s slender reed
when any electric guitar would do? Who did we think was listening?
Who, as we cried out, as we shook, rattled, and rolled,
would ever hear us among the blue multitudes of Christmas lights
strung as celestial hierarchies from the ceiling? Who
among the analphabetical ranks and orders
of warped records and secondhand books on our shelves,
the quarterlies and Silver Surfer comics, velvet Elvises,
candles burned in homage to Las Siete Potencias Africanas
as we sat basking in the half-blue glimmer,
tossing the torn foam basketball nigh the invisible hoop,
listening in our pitiless way to two kinds of music,
loud and louder, anarchy and roar, rock and roll
buckling the fundament with pure, delirious noise.
It welled up in us, huge as snowflakes, as manifold,
the way ice devours the reservoir in Central Park.
Like angels or the Silver Surfer we thought we could
kick free of the stars to steer by dead reckoning.
But whose stars were they? And whose angels
if not Rilke’s, or Milton’s, even Abraham Lincoln’s,
“the better angels of our nature” he hoped would emerge,
air-swimmers descendi
ng in apple-green light.
We worshipped the anonymous neon apostles of the city,
cuchifrito cherubs, polystyrene seraphim,
thrones and dominions of linoleum and asphalt:
abandoned barges on the Hudson mudflats;
Bowery jukes oozing sepia and plum-colored light;
headless dolls and eviscerated teddy bears
chained to the grilles of a thousand garbage trucks; the elms
that bear the wailing skins of plastic bags in their arms all winter,
throttled and grotesque, so that we sometimes wondered
walking Riverside Drive in February or March
why not just put up cement trees with plastic leaves
and get it over with? There was no limit to our capacity for awe
at the city’s miraculous icons and instances,
the frenzied cacophony, the democratic whirlwind.
Drunk on thunder, we believed in vision
and the convocation of heavenly presences summoned
to the chorus. Are they with us still? Are they
listening? Spirit of the tiny lights, ghost beneath the words,
numinous and blue, inhaler of bourbon fumes and errant shots,
are you there? I don’t know. Somehow I doubt we’ll ever know
which song was ours and which the siren
call of the city. More and more, it seems our errand
is to face the music, bring the noise, scour the rocks
to salvage grace notes and fragmented harmonies,
diving for pearls in the beautiful ruins,
walking all night through the pigeon-haunted streets
as fresh snow softly fills the imprint of our steps.
OK, I’m repeating myself, forgive me, I’m sure brevity
is a virtue. It’s just this melody keeps begging to be hummed:
McCarthy’s, on 14th Street, where the regulars drink
beer on the rocks and the TV shows Police Woman
twenty-four hours a day; the quiet, almost tender way
they let the local derelicts in to sleep it off
in the back booths of the Blue & Gold after closing;
and that sign behind the bar at the Marlin, you know
the one, hand-lettered, scribbled with slogans of love and abuse,
shopworn but still bearing its indomitable message
to the thirsty, smoke-fingered, mood-enhanced masses—
“Ice Cold Six Packs To Go.” Now that’s a poem.
Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer
We would like to
express sincere